…so having a system of timekeeping where, if it was 6pm in Paris it was five minutes sooner in London, kind of made sense. Or at least it didn’t cause enough fuckups to be considered something which needed fixing. At least if you were European. But European-style timekeeping, where everyone’s clock was set by the height of the sun at noon, was useless in a country like Canada, which is three times the size of Europe with a tenth the population. It was in 1878 when Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian engineer who was surveying the first Trans-Canada Railway, realised just how fucked “Euro-Style Local Time” would be when designing an engineering project that was 3200 miles long and twelve feet wide — picture a train travelling West to East and having to reset your watch every fifteen minutes for twelve days because every train station had a different Time Zone. So Fleming had the idea to break the world into 24 one hour segments. And, of course, the world adopted the idea straight away and in no way was there any hysteria at the possibility of change. The End. Oh… wait, there were a lot of people who considered his idea to be “against God’s will”. There were some who even condemned Fleming as an “Internationalist” (re: commie) for even thinking aboot bringing the world together under a single measurement of time. Most of these people were European and probably pictured North America as aboot the size of Denmark. But in 1884, at the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington DC, the system of International Standard Time Zones was adopted and put into place a year later. So Fleming made it possible for FedEx and UPS to actually schedule deliveries without suffering brain aneurisms, because Globalization doesn’t happen without standard measurements and time zones. In 1851 Fleming also designed Canada’s first adhesive postage stamp, the “Three Penny Beaver” (featuring a beaver, and costing three cents). He also faught for the construction of a transoceanic system of communication cables that eventually connected the entire British Empire. Fleming was made a knight in 1897 by Queen Victoria, and he served as chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario for 35 years.

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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.

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About Gabriel

I’ve lived in fifty-two places. I've been paid to pick stones out of fields, take backstage photos of Britney Spears, and report on Internet privacy issues. My photos have been published in several newspapers, and a couple of magazines.

Hey… Scotty — James Doohan — he was Canadian as well. He was in the Canadian Armed Forces and stormed the beach on D-Day… trust me, there are teams of Canadians who, right now, are creating new and exciting ways to get people from one place to another place. Then other Canadians, mostly ones living in Toronto, will take that excitement out of those creations, paint them beige and give them to American investors for promises that Americans will treat Torontonians less dismissively.

Yes, Canadians licked beaver for a lot of years… and, if given the opportunity we will gladly do it again. …until a few years ago, we were licking the backside of The Queen. Now we have self-adhesive stamps. Which makes sense.

A great way to time travel (and give homage to Sanford Fleming) is to take the train from Toronto to Vancouver. They have announcements on the speaker “we just passed into an other time zone, the local time is now…” Four times (!) during the 70 something (lost count on the way) hour ride.

And as an extra bonus, you get to see a little bit of Canada, the south side.

The only time I’ve travelled out to the Left Coast was when I was a kid… we kinda lived out there for a little while. I remember feeding chipmunks in Banff and the smell of the ocean in Vancouver. I’ve always wanted to go back by train… it’s a 3.5 day continuous trip through some amazing parts of Southern Canada. Maybe next year.